Alice Munro (1931–2024)

Alice Munro’s brilliant fourth book, the story cycle Who Do You Think You Are?, chronicles thirty or so years of Rose’s life, from humble small-town origins to her mature years as a woman who is more-or-less content with where that life has taken her. In hardscrabble Hanratty, Ontario, Rose grows up in a fractured household. Her mother has died and her father married Flo, a woman with a judgmental disposition who scorns pretention and preaches discipline, but who is rarely satisfied and show more constantly criticizes. Rose’s rebellious, questioning nature guarantees conflict, first within the home (“Royal Beatings”) and later on as she grows into a young woman who falls in and out of love and meanders from one profession to another, one lover to another, unsure what she really wants and who she wants to be. Embarrassed by her rustic, backward origins, she is not above playing the poorhouse card when it can be turned to her advantage (“Privilege”). In university she meets Patrick, whose family is well off, but it is more out of obligation than love that she agrees to marry him. Patrick worships her—sees her as a “damsel in distress”—and though Rose rejects that characterization, she can’t stand the idea of disappointing him; and also, being an actress, she can play the part and play it well (“The Beggar Maid”). No wonder the marriage fails, after which Rose sets out to find herself, working in television and on radio, indulging in desultory affairs, and playing little more than a bit part in her daughter’s life. It’s not until she meets Simon that she becomes truly smitten (“Simon’s Luck”) and makes a genuine effort. But the connection doesn’t last as, without explanation, Simon vanishes from her life. Rose’s story comes full circle when, now in her forties, she returns to Hanratty to deal with her aging stepmother, Flo, get her into a care home and pack up the house (“Who Do You Think You Are?”). The question posed by the book’s title resonates throughout, as young Rose chafes against the narrow moral and cultural confines of her upbringing only to escape into a larger world that, as she discovers, will always look for ways to impose limits on what she can say and do, limits that Rose rarely accepts and continually challenges. Published in 1978, in Who Do You Think You Are? Munro is writing about a post-war world that’s struggling to shrug off the stuffy traditions inherited from previous generations, a world where—via new media like television—people are inviting alien, unfamiliar and liberating concepts and behaviours into their homes on a daily basis. The psychological depth of Munro’s writing is often astonishing. Probing her characters without mercy, she reveals them as flawed humans who, though certainly capable of kindness, often choose instead to be manipulative, cruel, and selfish. The volume won Munro her 2nd Governor General’s Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize (under its international title The Beggar Maid). A must-read for any student of the 20th-century short story, almost 5 decades after publication Who Do You Think You Are? remains an iconic work of unquestionable power and devastating insight. show less

Alice Munro is a marvel. She focuses in on very specific subject matter (though she pushes those boundaries more in this collection than any other I have read, especially in the title story). Yet with all the similarities in her work, every story surprises me, and leaves me feeling off kilter. I think its the way she frames stories. Her narratives start at moments that seem like the middle of a story and make you wonder what came before, and then the stories end somewhere utterly different show more from where you expect them to end. It leaves you feeling like you missed something before and after, and yet each story is absolutely complete. I do not know how she does this, but she always does. I crave that off-kilter feeling. There is a beauty in the way she manages to make you see things from uncomfortable perspectives which implies a mastery of language. Munro brings language to heel and makes it do what she wants to it to do, but her language is not expansive or beautiful. Her language is plain, sometimes rather ugly, sometimes positively vulgar. Yet there are no more perfect words for what she is saying.

Bottom line, another perfect collection, though for me the greatest among equals was Wenlock Edge, which is odd and creepy and speaks exquisitely to the ways in which women accept the unacceptable, repress our honest reactions, take the blame for wrongs visited upon us, and lower our standards to recast situations to make even the most repulsive things appear as if they are satisfying to us. show less

Chosen for our book group because of Munro's recent death, this was a fantastic read. I haven't read anything by her because I am not a fan of short stories and even though it could be argued this was not really a novel, it was more novel than a set of themed short stories.

The novel tells of the coming-of-age of Del, the narrator who is gradually revealed to us. The stories/chapters each detail a particular point in the growing up but also include all the details of small town life that are show more going on around Del and her family. We start with Flats Road where Del and her family live much to her mother's chagrin. The place is aptly named with Del's mother saying that they live at the end of Flats Road to make it sound as if they don't come from there. In this story we are introduced to the fact that Del's mother is a disappointed woman but one who has modern ideas that don't fit with the rest of her local society or family and who reminds me not a little of Mrs Bucket (pronounced Bouquet). This out of the way, small place is contrasted with the big city where Uncle Benny goes to rescue a little girl and who gets completely and utterly lost and can only come home, never getting to the address that he was searching for. Surely, this is a metaphor for their lives.

The third story, Princess Ida, shifts focus to Del's mother and being unfulfilled in terms of education. By this time, Del and her mother are living in Jubilee whilst Del's father and brother remain out on the edge of the country at the fox farm. Del's mother tries to break into the society where she feels she belongs but it appears desperate and she is ignored by the other women and eventually gives up. It is at this point that Del realises that she is embarrased by her mother and starts to consider her own place in the world.

For the women in this book there is a constant struggle between pride, shame, ambition and education versus sex, jobs and families. I loved the Aunts in the second story, Heirs of the Living Body, who were clever but trained to be domestic and were excellent at it. But sometimes, their cleverness slipped out as they discussed others,

The nimble malice that danced under their courtesies . . .
p49

The writing is sublime, smooth and flowing with all the detail of small towns beautifully brought to our attention. When talking about the woman who led the book club in Jubilee, Munro writes

She had a magnificent name she would serve up to people sometimes, like a scaly fish on a platter, all its silvery, scaly syllables intact, but it was no use, nobody in Jubilee could pronounce or remember it.
p92

In one sentence we learn of the town's difficulties with a foreign name, their attitudes towards it, and how its owner played on this.

I am pretty sure one of the questions that we will discuss will in some way focus on the different ways men and girls and women are portrayed in the book.

The men are frequently weak or failures - Del's dad and her brother and the failed fox farm, uncultured - Uncle Benny, abusive - Uncle Craig, violent and religious zealots, unattractive physically although interesting intellectually.

The women are often under-educated but clever, long -suffering, constantly butting up against society's expectations, spinsters and beautiful but very young. Del is a girl/woman who knows she wants more than Jubilee can offer and that she wants to be a writer. Marriage, babies, housework - she knows this is not for her and has seen the humiliation and shame this has brought on her mother. show less

I gave myself two days to settle with this book before even attempting a review. Two days of thinking and reflecting and confirming the marvel that is this book. As one can tell from the title of the book, Munro focuses on the relationships between girls and women in this book and each chapter marked a new development for Del, the protagonist of this story.

Del is a precocious girl living first at the outskirts and then in the poor small town of Jubilee, Canada. Her mother writes in the paper show more and sells encyclopedias, and is considered an eccentric for her agnosticism, beliefs in women’s reproductive rights and other notions that of course must have been extremely “liberal” in a small and religious town in the 1940s, and her father is a fox farmer who lingers at the edges of the story for the most part.

Told in the first person and from Del’s point of view, we journey with her through her childhood and the characters that people her life and thoughts, her awakenings and conflicts and disasters and emerge with her at the end, fully nourished. The kind of story that grows and grows with each turn of the page, filled with brilliant understandings of life, death, spiritualit(ies)y, friendships and love.

One of the most exciting and fascinating aspects of this story is the town of Jubilee itself and the rich detail Munro furnishes it with. From its economic and recreational activities to the townspeople themselves, she creates such an intricate mesh, a breathing steaming town.
If you liked Toni Morrison’s [b:Sula|11346|Sula|Toni Morrison|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1441578153s/11346.jpg|3207953], William Maxwell’s [b:So Long, See You Tomorrow|14276|So Long, See You Tomorrow|William Maxwell|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1390750749s/14276.jpg|1267189], Willa Cather’s [b:My Ántonia|17150|My Ántonia (Great Plains Trilogy, #3)|Willa Cather|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1389151307s/17150.jpg|575450] or [b:The Neapolitan Novels|26828169|The Neapolitan Novels|Elena Ferrante|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1443412457s/26828169.jpg|46858867] of Elena Ferrante, then you’ll most likely like this one too. With this book Munro solidifies her place in my heart as one of my favourite writers, a great book. show less